For several centuries after he landed somewhere in the Bahamas, Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America was thought to be a good thing and Columbus himself celebrated for his heroic deeds. Four centuries after his arrival immigrants to America were still putting up statues to him raised by public subscription.11 By the five-hundredth anniversary of the event, in 1992, the calculus had changed. Columbus was no longer the discoverer of America: he was in fact the destroyer of America. America was now increasingly filled with people who seemed to wish he had never discovered the country in the first place. Columbus himself had been turned from a successful explorer and adventurer into a colonialist and, of course, a genocidist.

A rash of books published to coincide with the quincentenary made the obligatory claim that the actions of Columbus were in fact the progenitors for the actions of the Nazis. ‘On the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America’, was how one author put it.12 Another popular author wrote a book called The Conquest of Paradise, which presented pre-Columbus America as literally and metaphorically a garden of Eden. It was a place in which man and nature were claimed to have lived together in perfect harmony. The country that Columbus had brought into being, by contrast, was so appalling that it now looked set to be responsible for ‘the likely destruction – of the earth’.13

In the years that followed in America, everything to do with Columbus came up for review. Even the national Columbus Day holiday came under attack. Today numerous cities, starting with Seattle and Minneapolis, have legislated to rename ‘Columbus Day’ as ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’, presenting an opportunity to focus on the people who were in America before Columbus. As one descendant of indigenous peoples told the local radio in Oklahoma City when they were going through this debate, ‘This is something that I’ve struggled with for a long time. The fact that our country, our state and our city celebrate this holiday around this man who murdered and enslaved and raped indigenous people and decimated an entire population.’14 Of course, none of this had happened in her lifetime, nor the lifetime of anybody who she had ever known.